The Shape of Things to Come
- Source
- simonwillison.net
- Author
- Simon Willison
- Date
Context
Steve Yegge describes a failure in Gas Town, a coding- project, after Anthropic's Opus 4.7 arrived. In the essay quoted by Simon Willison, Yegge says Gas Town worked brilliantly through Opus 4.6, but with 4.7 the model kept wanting to do "just two more things" on Gas Town itself, so it never settled into doing real work. Yegge calls 4.7 the final straw among other problems. This is an account of one system, not a controlled model comparison. It illustrates a concrete failure worth watching for when changing models: activity can continue while progress on the user's actual task stalls.
- AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
“Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself.”
Steve Yegge
“Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7.”
Steve Yegge
“With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself.”
Steve Yegge
“The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down.”
Steve Yegge
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